BMC successfully sells self

Private equity mob shells out $US6.9bn for management software outfit

Enterprise software company BMC has agreed to be acquired by a troika of private equity companies, who will hand over $US46.25 of cash for each outstanding share in the company.

$6.9bn will therefore change hands to make the company the joint property of Bain Capital, Golden Gate Capital, GIC Special Investments and Insight Venture Partners. None of the four has, at the time of writing, issued a statement about the deal, but BMC has. The company's effort features chairman and CEO Bob Beauchamp saying “BMC believes the opportunity to become a private company will provide additional flexibility and position us to invest more strategically to drive powerful innovation and deliver cutting edge customer solutions.”

The statement also features comments from Bain Capital managing director Ian Loring, who says “BMC is the only enterprise software vendor that can go from mainframe to mobile, with solutions that help IT drive real business innovation and optimize operations management and employee productivity.” Prescott Ashe, managing director of Golden Gate, weighs in with the kind of optimism one would expect from a chap about to write cheques bearing preposterous numbers of zeros, saying “BMC is an innovative leader in IT operations management and has strong leadership positions in growing segments such as cloud management, service management and workload automation,” and declaring himself “excited to work with the management team and employees to accelerate BMC's growth and strengthen its position as the best-in-class provider of IT management software for heterogeneous environments.”

Now that we've got that over with, it's worth pointing out the deal's not done and dusted, as for the next thirty days BMC is bound to consider alternative offers from anyone who feels like buying an enterprise software company.

Any such suitor will of course read BMC's annual results, released today, and will doubtless note that fourth quarter sales of $569m were just one percent ahead of the corresponding quarter in its previous financial year, while revenue rose just $30m for the year, to $2.2bn.

BMC's talking up an 80 per cent climb in software-as-a-service (SaaS) customers, which now number over 600. A 39 per cent surge in “cloud-related license bookings”, which brought in $100m – a 35 per cent jump year-over-year, is also offered as a highlight. ®